Rogers vows to cease Internet throttling

One year after a Rogers Communications Inc. customer complained of her Internet connection being intentionally slowed or "throttled" while playing certain online games, Canada's largest cable Internet provider has vowed to drop the controversial practice

One year after a Rogers Communications Inc. customer complained of her Internet connection being intentionally slowed or “throttled” while playing certain online games, Canada’s largest cable Internet provider has vowed to drop the controversial practice.

In a letter sent Friday to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Rogers’ regulatory chief Ken Engelhart said the Toronto-based company “will cease traffic shaping in our network this year.” The vow comes two weeks after the federal regulator said Rogers had broken Canada’s Internet traffic management rules.

“In the real world, an insignificantly small amount of traffic would be subject to traffic management,” Mr. Engelhart said in a letter addressed to Andrea Rosen, the CRTC’s chief compliance and enforcement officer.

“Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution and to allay any concerns which the Commission’s investigation may have created, we have reconfigured the Cisco equipment so that the unclassified traffic on peer-to-peer ports is no longer traffic managed.”

Teresa Murphy, a Rogers customer and player of the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, first filed a complaint with the CRTC last February alleging Rogers had inaccurately classified her gaming activities as peer-to-peer (p2P) file sharing. Rogers admitted to the practice a month later and the CRTC first demanded an explanation from the company last July.

Although P2P software such as BitTorrent is generally used for the (occasionally copyright-infringing) transfer of music and video files World of Warcraft publisher Activision Blizzard Inc. uses P2P technology to distribute updates. Throttling can render the game — which boasts more than 11 million players globally — virtually unplayable.

Traffic management practices has long been employed by Canadian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as they battle what they have described as growing traffic congestion on their networks. But thanks to “new technologies and ongoing investments in network capacity,” Mr. Engelhart said Rogers will begin phasing out the practice next month.

Half of all Rogers customers will no longer be at risk of throttling by June, he said, with the new system rolling out to all Rogers Internet subscribers by December.

Larry Chang, vice president of engineering for Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s largest networking equipment maker and supplier of traffic management technology to Rogers, suggested Rogers had already started the phase-out in his own letter to the CRTC sent Friday.

“Our equipment can be configured so that this traffic is not subject to traffic management, and it is our understanding that Rogers has now adopted this configuration,” he said.

Vancouver-based digital advocacy group OpenMedia.ca commended the announcement, with executive director Steve Anderson saying he was “extremely pleased that Rogers was forced to stop restricting access to online services.”

Not everyone is satisfied Rogers is going far enough. Jason Koblovsky, co-founder of the Canadian Gamers Organization, said he was concerned over the lack of technical data in Rogers’ submission relating to the specific game titles the company tested to determine which ones were being subjected to throttling.

“Without the technical data from their tests on online games, the Canadian Gamers Organization worries that Rogers’ response may be an attempt to mislead the CRTC and the public,” he said.

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